Keaton Jenner

Never seen a better argument for congestion pricing than the Walter Taylor bridge in peak hour

My Kingdom for mid to high rise units in Graceville.

What I find encouraging, though, is this means you can make significant inroads just by permitting more supply. It stops becoming an impossibly intractable issue & can hopefully move it out of the too hard basket.

This is such an important point. The plurality of the homeless pop (I think ~40%) is people in overcrowded dwellings. Not what is typically thought of (eg sleeping rough). So our policy responses focus on what intuitively feels will help the visible form of the issue.

I don’t think there is one. It seems straightforwardly about the former being more visible & therefore offending the sensibilities of those proposing bans. The latter is hidden away & so doesn’t conjure a response. Maybe also a sense in which the former is seen as directly profiting developers.

Isolation in the outer fringe of cities means loss of connection, less access to support, and a higher need for flexible employment. My sense is YIMBYs have already made these arguments + prosecuted the social justice angle but with minimal cut-through. Is it just vibes all the way down? 5/5

What I am still left to ponder is how we make these spaces more attractive to women. This would be very hard if they become symbols of male disaffection (rightly or wrongly). My sense is women have just as much at stake in this debate, esp if they have young children. 4/5

Curiously, I mostly see upwardly mobile men in these spaces. Speculatively at income levels & in industries (tech, finance) that would have previously afforded relatively straightforward access to suitable housing. Maybe this proximity to status makes it an even harder pill to swallow? 3/5

Evans sets out at least a partial explanation for why YIMBY spaces would be so attractive to young men. If we make housing easier to obtain that helps young men re-claim some status. 2/3

This is one of the most thought-provoking pieces I encountered this year. The tl;dr is that men are finding it harder to get good jobs, housing, and wives. This loss of status has at least partly driven a gender-based backlash.

But I want to elaborate on the YIMBY section at the end…1/5

True although Ipswich is imo more exposed to climate shocks. At least as flood prone + more variable temperatures.

You might want to check out some Matt Kahn’s stuff if you want a more optimistic take on climate adaptation

Interesting thoughts. I’m a bit hesitant on the polycentric city idea for Bris. In Sydney the 2nd & 3rd centres are much more exposed to climate shocks & also where most new housing has been located recently.

Typically not much more living space than a unit & you have a patch of lawn that requires upkeep but is too small to serve any functional purpose. Maybe an issue of design? But I would much rather live in an apartment near a well-serviced park. 3/3.

Second, I do not quite understand obsession with town houses from some. Please, build all the townhouses we need. I do not object. But for me offered worst value for money. Much more land intensive than a unit so more $. Still have to deal with body corporate, 2/3

Always found attitudes like those found in this comment puzzling. Students and 18-20 year olds also need somewhere to live. They don’t disappear just b/c we don’t accommodate them. The alternative is arrested development in family home or crowded share houses. 1/3

Do you have any papers you can share? I have seen city labour demand elasticities like Beaudry, Green & Sand which are approx -0.3.

Properly modelling HH size seems wickedly difficult. I thought the Finlay&Williams paper was an encouraging innovation but will re-read given your comments.

So demand at a national level is more inelastic than at a city level. E.g because Sydney and Melbourne are closer substitutes than Aus and New Zealand. And then demand becomes more elastic the further you zoom in b/c suburbs within cities are more interchangeable than cities within countries

I am not sure the 0.4 number does avoid the issue. HH size in Saunders-Tulip is a rolling 5-year avg, so does not vary with changes in income or price.

Can you elaborate what you mean about the time dimension? I tend to think of demand elasticity mostly varying at levels of geographic aggregation…

That mechanism is not captured in C&D to my understanding. But I think their method is highly suited to considering one state or city in isolation. But needs to account for these +ve spillovers to get to a national figure. 2/2

Thanks for the clarification and I agree. My point is that deflating land values in LA will also help lower them in, say, Phoenix. Those that were previously displaced can move back at a lower price point. That takes pressure off of the Phoenix market even w/o extra local building. 1/2

What number would you? Agree it matters a lot for results. I think Albouy et al + Finlay & Williams are in the 0.5 to 0.6 range. The national-level elasticity we use in Aus is ~ 0.4. But I think city-level should be larger.

Fair point, and it’s not clear which bias is larger. I agree theirs is 100% the framework local planning should use. But to aggregate to a national shortage we would ideally factor in cross-price elasticities, since building more in say LA reduces the own-city shortage but also helps elsewhere.

The C&D paper is a big improvement over methods that extrapolate from historic HH formation. But I think the national estimate is over-stated b/c they do not account for spillovers from hypothetically increasing supply in e.g New York to the shortage in California.

Scroll back a bit bud.

But now that you’re following am gunna switch this to an Evanescence appreciation account.

Ben Hunt is the best possible addition the Broncos could have made to their roster this offseason. Key weaknesses were halves depth & top end talent at #9 & he provides both. It also means an injury to Reynolds is no longer the end of the season.

In this working paper that was published today, Matthew Maltman and I review some of the economic evidence on the effects of ✨upzoning✨in Auckland in 2016.

tldr: We find remarkably robust evidence that upzoning led to more housing and lower rents in Auckland. Wow!
www.motu.nz/our-research...

So what we tend to anchor on is that prices continue increasing, even when there is a lot of building nearby. This is one of Peter's other important points: even a lot of *local* building won't have a big impact *local* rents. He puts it better than I can so I'll leave you with his explanation 15/n

Moreover, there is a salience issue. It's very easy to observe nominal rents increasing. It's very hard to parse out the cet par effect of dwelling age on occupants' income or to observe moving chains trigged by new construction. 14/n

I think this goes some way to explaining why there is a deep scepticism about filtering being a reliable source of affordable housing. Although filtering works, it can be overwhelmed by a general shortage of housing. 13/n

So how much filtering be working (or not) lately, with rental inflation around 7% in Brisbane? Almost certainly upwards! Given we typically we think that y, the price elasticity of demand, is around -0.5, downward filtering would require |d| to 5-10x larger than anything in Rosenthal's paper. 12/n